Tag Archives: Chinese Prefolds

There are so many great cloth diapering options out there, I want to draw your attention to one more! I believe people who decide to cloth diaper strive to get the best value for their money without sacrificing baby’s comfort. What if you could combine the value of a prefold with the comfort/ease of a pocket diapers? Let me tell you how I did… I love my pocket diapers. I adore the ease of using a pocket diaper as well as their ability to wick mosture away from baby’s bum. My favorite and trusted night-time diaper is the bumGenius One Size 3.0 pocket diaper. I found the 100% polyester suedecloth used in them is wonderful for keeping baby dry for long periods of time. The only thing with these is that they can be a little more pricy when looking to use them all the time. On the other hand I like the great value of my Chinese prefolds. They are relatively inexpensive and are often called the “work-horse” of a cloth diapering stash (I know they are mine). The downfall of these are that they don’t usually hold up over night and you have to add liners to wick moisture away. So, I decided to go searching for something that I could inexpensively add to my pre-existing stash (which largely includes Chinese prefolds and microfiber inserts) to give me …

When I first became interested in cloth diapering, I was pregnant with my now ten month old daughter. I wanted to use cloth diapers instead of disposables, but I had been told they were hard to get clean. I was worried that they wouldn’t be sanitary. I scoured the internet trying to find out how best to wash cloth diapers – What kind of detergent/soap should I use? How much? Would I need to add anything else like vinegar or baking soda? What about bleach? OxyClean? Bac-Out? And then: should I use a wet pail method or a dry pail method? Do I need one of those sprayer thingys? It was all so overwhelming. So I decided to just pick something and gave it a try. I figured if it didn’t work, I could always do something else. I purchased one of the size small Bummis cloth diaper kits that comes with 3 dozen prefolds and 6 Bummis super whisper wraps. I have always just folded the prefolds into thirds and placed them in the cover – no pins or snappies. If she only peed, the diaper went into the pail and the cover stayed out in rotation. If she pooped, it would usually get on the cover too so the whole thing – diaper and cover – went into the pail. Now that she has started solid foods, I …

One of the most common reactions I get from people when I tell them I use cloth diapers (after “Eew!”) is: “Isn’t it an awful lot of work? I mean, all that laundry…” The answer is of course no, it’s not much work at all. Certainly a lot less “work” than I’d have to do to afford disposables. The wash and care routine did take me a long time to develop though. When I decided to try cloth diapers I didn’t know anyone else who had used them in the past twenty-five years or so. I bought a couple of fitted diapers on a whim one day while I was checking out a local consignment store. I had no idea how to care for them, so I asked the owner of the store and she very helpfully wrote me out some detailed instructions. Considering the fact that those instructions directed me to fill a wet bucket with cold water and vinegar, rinse diapers by dunking them in the toilet and use the strongest detergent I could find and bleach once a week, it’s pretty surprising that I stuck with cloth diapers at all. I knew I wanted to move away from disposables though, so one day it finally occurred to me to type “cloth diapers” into a search engine to see if there were any other options and the world …

It has taken me a little while to figure out what works best with cloth diapering 2 – my oldest is 22 months and my youngest is 8 months. I finally came up with a great plan that does the trick for my family. My laundry room is across from the boys bathroom so I keep the diaper pail right inside that door so after a quick spray from the wonderful diaper sprayer ( I can’t imagine how I made it so long without one) I just take a few steps and it’s in the laundry room. I would highly recommend having at least 2 large diaper pail liners/bags. I only had one for a while and it wasn’t the best. Once I got my second one – I placed the dirty one in the wash with the diapers and the other was immediately placed in the pail and ready for more dirty diapers. (I used to just put the dirty ones in a big tub while waiting for the one and only diaper liner to wash and then air dry.) I have enough diapers to do laundry every other day – with a few exceptions. The boys are almost in the same size for all the diapers except for a few of the AIO’s and the BG’s that we use for nighttime. Once the diaper are clean and dry …

As with so many things, there is no simple answer as to which is better, one-size or sized. Otherwise there would be only one kind of cloth diaper on the market. My diaper stash includes a wide variety of diapers including sized Sandy’s, Monkey Doodlez, and WAHM made diapers, one-size BumGenius, Mother-ease, Mommy’s Touch and Haute Pockets and adjustable sized Bamboozles (comes in two sizes, but each size can be altered a little with snaps) as well as prefolds and contours. I have found that diapers pass in and out of favor with me over time. One-size diapers are certainly convenient and economical. The idea of registering for 36 diapers at your baby shower and having them last throughout the diapering years is an attractive one if it means less hassle and expense for you. My daughter has been wearing the same BumGenius and Mother-ease diapers since she was two months old and they’re still going strong at nineteen months. I didn’t start using cloth diapers at birth though, and I have heard that it can be very difficult to get a good fit on a newborn from a one-sized diaper. The same goes for toddlers and very chunky infants. It can be very disappointing to buy a heap of diapers thinking you will never need any others, only to find they really DON’T fit your particular shape of baby. …